When you first created your website, you probably started with a single page and built onto it from there. If you were building a home, you wouldn’t build it like that. You would have a blueprint, a map if you will, of the entire home before you laid down a single piece of wood. However, most of us don’t build our websites that way.

If you are going to have a website that is easily navigable and easily found by the search engines, then you need to understand sitemaps. Sitemaps are the blueprint for your website and are absolutely essential in today’s search engine-oriented world.

Most sitemaps are organized in a hierarchical fashion. Your home page sits at the top of the hierarchy, with pages like “About us”, “Contact us”, “Products”, “Terms and Conditions” listed below. Then below those pages, is another level of pages. This is the way the standard sitemap is organized.

A search engine understands sitemaps in a slightly different way. The larger search engines like Google and Yahoo go to your server space and actually look for a file called “sitemap”. This file is a link to and description of each page on your website. This is how the search engine knows what pages to look at, what pages not to look at, and how to categorize both the pages and your entire site.

You need to understand sitemaps and their importance in ranking on search engines if you are going to take advantage of their services. Many website owners do not take the time to create the “sitemap” file, and because of that, they don’t see their listings on the search engines. Take the time to learn this part of the SEO world, and you will see your website start to move up the rankings.